SumTotal News

Skillsoft Reaffirms its Position as the World’s No.1 Corporate Learning Company

Percipio goes live with tens of thousands of reimagined micro learning assets

June 14th, Boston MA - Following a hugely successful transformation and more than $40 Million of investment in platform and content in the last 18 months, Skillsoft’s new state of the art learning platform, Percipio, is now live and on general availability, alongside thousands of brand new micro-learning assets – reaffirming Skillsoft’s position as the world’s number one corporate learning company, with the largest library of courseware and micro-learning assets in the market today.

Today’s learners want to find content really quickly, they want to complete a topic in less than 5 minutes, they want to come back to their course, wherever, whenever and on whatever device they choose. They want guidance through learning paths, and curated content, in a beautiful consumer-led experience. Employers want the confidence that their learners have access to the best, curated, widest and deepest content assets which will deliver the desired learning outcomes to build and maintain world class organizations. This experience is now available from Skillsoft today.

Platform – Percipio

With almost 20 years’ experience in building learning technologies, having already trained more than 400 million learners, Skillsoft delivers through Percipio exactly what users are looking for – Netflix™ style, cutting edge technology and consumer-led design, creating hand crafted, personalized and tailored experiences to the individual’s learning and development requirements. Using that 20 years of experience, data, analytics and usage patterns, Skillsoft has developed its own competency-based channels to deliver the very best learning outcomes in an efficient, flexible and adaptive user experience. Going forward, using machine learning and AI, Skillsoft will continue to enhance that tailored and personalized learning experience.

A truly responsive mobile experience: Learners canaccess the wealth of learning, training and course content through the Percipio mobile experience, so learning can happen anywhere, anytime, and on any device.

The Percipio App (available on Android and iOS): Allow learners to read, watch or listen, anytime and anywhere. The app enables you to synchronize your learning across all your devices, to continue reading, watching or listening.

Consumer-Led Experience: Using a Netflix™ style learning platform, modeled after exhaustive research to deliver consumer-led experiences learners have come to expect in all aspects of their daily lives, with cutting edge technology, a simple-to-use interface and super-fast search.

Personalized learning playlists: and one-click access to content.

Curated Learning Paths (channels): These paths provide engaging content for users to discover, access, and apply knowledge from over 450 channels. These channels have been developed by curating over 50,000 competencies that have been mapped by our experts and aligned to various competencies and skills valued by leading organizations.

State of the Market Search: Using Elastic Search, used by Facebook™, Netflix™, and eBay™ to quickly find micro-learning videos, courses, channels, and books.

Multiple Modalities: Allow learners to choose how they want to learn with videos to watch, books or summaries to read, and audiobooks to listen.

Learning Impact: Show how learning actively supports key business objectives, and quantify program value with out-of-the-box reporting using the latest data visualization methodology.

Percipio Next

Percipio will deliver continuous innovation in an agile quarterly release cycle. Future releases will include

Contextual learning

Full integration with market leading LMS

Social recommendations

Shared playlists

Practice labs

Quizzes & tips

Percipio will also allow custom content, third party content and truly “open” curated content capability.

Available now in English – Percipio will shortly be available in six other languages.

Content

Over the past eighteen months Skillsoft has entirely reimagined its content library and has led the way in scenario based, learner-centric, character led learning. With the world’s largest library of corporate micro-learning assets, Skillsoft now has unrivalled competencies, including Business Skills, Personal Development, Leadership, IT Certification, Program and Project Management, Software Development, Cyber Security, DevOps, Digital Skills and an end-to-end compendium of the leading Compliance and Corporate Certification requirements that organizations demand today.

This library now runs into more than half a million micro-learning assets – including 130,000 videos & topics, and more than 450,000 authoritative content chapters to complement that courseware, as well as live mentoring and hands on labs. With this library and these modalities, Skillsoft offers unrivalled access to the largest and most comprehensive set of corporate training assets in the world. Skillsoft’s content is accessed more than 130 million times a month, in 160 countries and 29 languages.

This new approach by Skillsoft, working with some of the world’s leading companies, with an obsession on adapting to today’s user needs, allows the learner to fully control their own desired learning experience and gives their organization the confidence to ensure they achieve the desired learning outcomes. Skillsoft provides a single corporate learning solution supporting all of the learning requirements of organizations and their learners. This uniquely positions Skillsoft as the global leader and innovator in the corporate learning market.

Our research from neuroscience tells us that learners need three things in a learning experience: relevance, meaning and emotion. Through scenarios, panel discussions and other effective instructional design techniques we create memory hooks for the learner. The use of scenarios and storytelling enables us to explain the abstract in concrete ways. Individuals can connect the learning to pre-existing schemas and patterns in their brains at the same time that we engage both sides of the brain by fostering a linkage between emotion and cognition.

Content coming soon

Next Generation Coding labs inside the platform – Releasing this summer – the next generation of Coding Labs. This new and innovative approach will allow developers to code and compile in a practice mode within the actual developer application. Learners will also have access to a Performance Based Assessment mode. This Assessment mode is key to developers demonstrating they have the skills to do the job and are ready to progress to the next level.

Brand new Leadership Platform – Digital Leadership Development Platform will include new 45 minute courses, comprised of scenario-based behavioral demonstration instruction, as well as exercises with practice questions distributed within individual videos to serve as periodic knowledge checks for the learner. There will be an assessment for each course aligned to the topic objectives.

What our Clients are saying

“Percipio’s curated learning paths will help my learners self-direct their learning, which is part of the cultural change we are trying to build inside our organization, and will also help the curators more easily assign learning to fill key skill gaps. This will save us time and talent curating internally in the organization. Also, this helps ensure that our people are following best of breed learning paths,” said Laura Garza, executive director of Human Resources and Talent Development at Praxair.

“We are excited about the prospects for Percipio. FedEx is moving toward a journey-based leadership development model. The channels approach in Percipio looks to be a good fit for our future direction,” said Karl Guenther, Center for Continuous Learning, FedEx.

“By using Elastic Search, Percipio provides the kind of experience that market-leading consumer websites provide. In addition, the auto-complete search options make it easy to see other popular search terms to check out,” said Helen Sussex, culture and experience CoE at CGI.

What the market is saying

“Skillsoft has a very robust library of training content and excellent relationships with influential and recognized SMEs,” said Cushing Anderson, program vice president, Business Consulting and IT Education, IDC. “In this current age of increased demands and accelerating change, no one has time to waste. Learners must quickly find answers to meet their learning needs. With Percipio, Skillsoft has helped accelerate the time to competence for learners.”

“Skillsoft’s Percipio provides the learner with the power of choice in how they consume content by leveraging three core principles: Watch, Read, and Listen,” said Michael Rochelle, chief strategy officer and principal HCM Analyst at Brandon Hall Group. “Percipio puts the power of learning in the hands of the learner, where it belongs . Learners want to be accountable for their own learning and create their own personalized learning environment. Percipio makes this happen with elegance and sophistication.”

Speaking about Percipio, Josh Bersin, principal and founder, Bersin by Deloitte, Deloitte Consulting LLP said, “The demand for easy-to-use, digital learning programs is one of the biggest issues on the minds of employees and employers today. Platforms that create a TV-like interface to content, to enable reading, watching and listening together, and deliver industry leading skills are in high demand around the world. Percipio meets these demands and provides learners with an innovative new platform.”

SumTotal

SumTotal is a leading provider of talent management solutions, continuously innovating to allow for the changing demands of customers and their users. The Talent Expansion Suite includes three key components –Talent, Learn, and Work. The award winning SumTotal Talent Suite simplifies and streamlines talent management for organizations and engages employees with innovative solutions to know, mobilize, develop, promote, reward, and incentivize global organizations of all sizes.

SumTotal 17.1 delivers a unique proposition in the market – a wholly integrated suite of Learn, Talent and Workforce Management on a single data model in the cloud. By bringing all the HCM components into one code base, SumTotal delivers an industry first, state of the market, digital technology experience with cutting edge functionality and a beautiful consumer-led experience.

SumTotal – what’s next

SumTotal 17.2 will extend the core platform to include next generation social and gamification capabilities including suite-wide social collaboration, leader boards, badging and mentoring support. This release will enhance our Talent Acquisition suite, with a completely redesigned recruiting solution with seamless support for internal and external candidates, best-in class interview team scheduling and training, as well as a mobile first candidate experience.

SumTotal will continue its leadership in learning with comprehensive, out-of-the-box support for the Experience API (xAPI) as well as the ability to aggregate content across third party content platforms and MOOCs. Finally, 17.2 will extend our end-to-end Workforce Management solution with the ability to validate learning certifications as well as enable self-service vacation trading.

What the market is saying

“SumTotal’s move to the Leader quadrant is due in part to the recent advancements made to their SumTotal Talent Expansion® Suite, but most importantly, with their workforce management enhancements,” said Brent Skinner, principal analyst, Nucleus Research. “SumTotal has created the technology to bring workforce management together with talent, learning, and recruitment into one platform. This brings a compelling proposition to the market by delivering all of the Human Capital Management (HCM) components together on a single, unified SaaS platform.”

“The transformation Skillsoft has undergone with the learning content and SumTotal Talent Expansion Suite has placed them as a Leader in the Aragon Research Globe for Corporate Learning, 2017 Report,” said Jim Lundy, CEO and lead analyst, Aragon Research. “The new suite offers a modern, engaging user experience with machine intelligence at its core, making it one of the easiest to use systems on the market.”

About SkillsoftSkillsoft is the global leader in eLearning, providing the most engaging learner experience and high-quality content. We are trusted by the world’s leading organizations, including 65 percent of the Fortune 500. Our mission is to build beautiful technology and engaging content that drives business impact for today’s modern enterprise. Our 500,000+ multi-modal courses, videos, authoritative content chapters and micro-learning modules are accessed more than 130 million times every month, in 160 countries and 29 languages. With 100% secure cloud access, from any device, whenever, wherever. www.skillsoft.com